As a former Chapter Leader for Room to Read, Adriane Herrick Juarez saw firsthand the important impact that Room to Read has had developing 20,000 libraries and literacy-partnerships around the world and positively affecting the lives of over 11.6 million children through primary school literacy programs and secondary school girls’ education efforts. In this interview with Dr. Geetha Murali, new CEO of Room to Read as of January 2018, we take a global look at Room to Read’s model of deep, systemic transformation in low-income countries as they implement their vision that states, “World Change Starts with Educated Children.”

Through Geetha’s insights, we gain knowledge about what it takes to optimize organizational reach and impact with a laser-focus on an organization’s technical portfolio. This includes investing in proven solutions that address challenges for the long-term – while collaborating with communities, partners, and governments – something that all libraries must do. Come with us on an inspiring world-journey as we learn how to formulate and communicate strong, measurable results – moving beyond passion with hard work and best practices to create transformative change.

Full Transcript

Does your library know how to formulate and communicate
strong, measurable results, moving beyond passion with hard work and best
practices? Today on Library Leadership Podcast we talk with Geetha Murali, new
CEO of Room to Read, a global nonprofit organization that has built 20,000
libraries in 15 countries, over 17 years, affecting the lives of 11.6 million
children. Listen to hear how Geetha uses laser-focus on Room to Read’s
technical portfolio to create transformative change.

Great question. Well, I guess first, just by starting with
what Room to Read is – it’s a global organization which has transformed the
lives of millions of children. We’re focused on low-income countries and
specifically on literacy and gender equality in education. If we go back in our
history we were started in 2000 by our founder, John Wood, and co-founders
Aaron Donoghue, and Dinesh Shrestha.

They started the organization with the belief that world
change starts with educated children, and across them, they had a mix of
for-profit international experience. They wanted to create an organization that
focused on measurable results for communities. They recognized that it wouldn’t
be easy and they had to learn as they went. So, that same focus on strong
results and ongoing learning has really evolved our thinking as an
organization. If you look at us today, our innovative model focuses on very
deep, systemic transformation within communities and particularly on two
critical milestones in a child’s life. Early primary school, when they really
need to focus on literacy acquisition, and secondary school girls’ education.

Room to Read has evolved considerably in the way we view our
work. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations,
and governments to make sure that we’re developing literacy skills and also a
habit of reading among primary school children. We also then work with girls as
they’re completing secondary school, but it’s not just about the completion.
It’s about ensuring that they have the skills necessary to make their next
steps in life. So, by focusing now on quality of education and not just access,
which is something that is incredibly important as we move ahead, we’ve been
able to ensure that learning outcomes are measured.

We’ve created a model that can be replicated and localized,
and most importantly sustained by governments. So, just in terms of numbers to
give you a sense of size Room to Read benefited 11,600,000 children today
across 20,000 communities. We still have a lot to do but we’re excited about
where we’ve come so far, and really looking forward to the future.

We’ve worked with 20,000 communities across 15 countries to
date, so quite a footprint. There’s still a lot to do, 250,000,000 children who
don’t have basic skills, we’ve got 130,000,000 girls not in school. There’s a
lot to do, but we’ve definitely come far in our first 17 years. We believe we
have the solutions to solve many of these issues in the communities where we
work. So, it’s just about getting everywhere where Room to Read is needed.

That’s a really good question, something I think about a
lot. I think at the phase that I am in my life and my career, I more and more
tend to shy away from the philosophy of just follow your passion. I think it’s
much more nuanced than that. I think you absolutely have to put in the hard
work to become excellent at something, and that something has to be important
and it has to be valued – to yourself, to your company, or in Room to Read’s
case, to the world.

The follow your passion mentality, without the work to back
it, can lead you to jump from job to job, or task to task without really
finding something that sticks. Alternatively, I think if you put the hours into
gaining skills, knowledge, and just as importantly, really strong
relationships, they make you much more successful in whatever you’re doing.

Room to Read has found that it really is about our network.
We are a movement that has grown up from a family of individuals, and
individuals within companies around the world that have supported our cause.
The concept I’m speaking to – you can read books like the Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, or So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport, they talk about this
idea of hard work and focus. I really do believe that hard work has been what
has paved my trajectory.

Of course, there are things like serendipity and the
goodwill of good people along the way that has helped incredibly. I wouldn’t be
here without all of them. But, in the end, putting in the time to gain the
skills and the knowledge and, like I was saying, just as importantly the
relationship that Room to Read needs to move ahead is really what I’m focused
on. I think that notion that the learning never ends is what continues to drive
us forward.

Well, like I was saying earlier, the numbers are staggering
in terms of the need across this world with 250,000,000 children not getting
the basic skills – 130,000,000 girls not in school. If you asked about my
vision, changing those statistics through our work at Room to Read is
paramount, first and foremost in everything that we’re doing. The world, in my
opinion, can’t afford for Room to Read to slow down.

I’m of the singular belief that we have a responsibility,
while we work, to further our mission. So, everything that I do, in terms of
the decision-making at the organization, the setting of our strategic
direction, really is in answering this one question over and over again, what
is best for the mission of Room to Read.

As a third generation CEO, I have an incredible opportunity
to take the organization forward in a way that honors our founding legacy, but
also contributes a new and fresh perspective. I see our evolution as an
organization into a more established brand where more people, in more places,
know what Room to Read is focused on, and they support us in our efforts.

We need to optimize our reach and our impact around the
world through a laser-focus on our portfolio. What are we good at? From a
technical standpoint, Room to Read is a technical organization at its core. We
develop best practice in implementation of grade literacy and gender equality
programming.

So, what are we best at? How do we optimize our ability to
reach more children with better programs every day? Our research and our work
will irrevocably establish Room to Read as a thought leader in the space while
strengthening our ties to be able to do more good work. Internally, I should
say it’s just as important to focus on our culture and our values. They provide
the foundation for everything that we’re building. Were a 1,500-person
organization so, we are all about our people, the talent that we attract, and
the inspiration that we give them to do good work.

I do think that we can change the world but to do so, you
put the hard work in for a long period of time. We need to do so in a way that
strengthens our ability to embrace life and embrace joy, and having fun along
the way as a team, is just as important as doing the good work we’re doing in
communities. Because, this is a marathon and not a
sprint, and our team needs to build to stay with us for the long haul.

I found great joy when working with Room to Read as a
volunteer in Africa and Asian, as well as working with staff. Where did you get
your models, and do you have any favorite leadership books that you draw upon?

This is definitely a hard one for me because I’ve enjoyed so
many leadership books over the years, and largely because different ones speak
to different phases of my life or career. But, I must say the book that just
absolutely blew my mind when I read it was Freakonomics,
largely because it made abundantly clear that things are not always what they
seem, and what we think we may know we may not know. There’s always a different
perspective. If I think about it more recently, I enjoyed Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat, because it just reminded me how much
more control we have over being happy than we might think and emphasized a lot
of other sort of leadership learning that I valued over the years,
particularly. For example, there’s a book Emotional
Intelligence that talks about the importance of being able to listen for
understanding at work and managing your emotions.

I think all of these concepts tie together but ultimately it
comes down to the notion that the world is made up of a lot of different people
with a lot of different perspectives and at Room to Read we really do value
diversity, diversity of opinion and thought. We have experts from international
education. We have a business development expert, implementation, and
operations experts. Each, in their own right, is bringing a certain perspective
to the table, and it’s what makes the finished product what we’re delivering to
the communities that we serve, so high quality and so unique in relationship to
what other organizations are able to deliver, because we’ve definitely brought
together a unique group of people. So, I think our perspective on how we do our
work and how we deliver our work is all the better as a result.

There are just so many experiences that I think we as staff
of Room to Read are able to be a part of simply because we are in the business
of ensuring that children find the best possible future that they can. In that
context, in any country that Room to Read delivers its programs, where we
establish our libraries, you can see the before and after. You can see schools
with no materials, little space, no furniture, or even if there is furniture,
its hand-me-down furniture for adults, that’s not age-appropriate for children.
It doesn’t bring to mind the childhood that we all want children to have. When
you see that, as opposed to the colorful, child-friendly libraries full of
hundreds and hundreds of books, with colorful covers, incredibly imaginative
storylines and characters that children can relate to because they’re
contextually relevant and they’ve come from their own communities, you see a
child find humor and joy in a way that you would have never thought possible
prior to those libraries being in place.

We talk about the children and how they feel, but as staff
and that’s not just the staff who are designing programs and implementing but,
we have very local field staff who are going to these schools, helping provide
support to these teachers and who take every child in that school seriously.
It’s their responsibility to see these children doing better.

So, Room to Read’s model is not about train some teachers
and have them go off and hopefully they do a good job. But, we’re with these
schools for the long-term and our literacy program – up to four years with
girls’ education, to seven years in a school
– to make sure there are shifts in these communities and that there are
shifts in the ways that adults view education. That having kids laughing and
enjoying learning is important and having them experience the joy of learning
is important.

That is critical to what we’re doing. It’s about, not just,
the communities we serve, but the staff delivering the program to build this
culture, and to build this notion that learning is fun, but is important, and
that it will give these children the power and choice that they need to choose
their futures.

There’s so many girls in our program, but I’ll tell you a
particularly inspirational trip for me that happened just a few years ago. I
was actually able to travel to two countries on the same trip, one to
Bangladesh and the other to India. The trip to Bangladesh, the program in
Bangladesh was quite new at the time. The girls in the program had only been
getting some of our trainings for a few months. I was able to go to one of
their life skills training.

Interestingly, there were still boys in the classroom and
the training was just about to start. The girls were very quiet. They weren’t
speaking in a way that I felt like we wanted them to be speaking up in terms of
any questions we were asking. They definitely didn’t feel comfortable. So, I
asked our staff to have the boys leave the classroom. I had our male staff
leave the classroom and I spent some time with the girls.

Immediately as the men left the classroom the girls gathered
up around me and started asking me questions about why I was traveling without
my husband, whether he was okay with me traveling, whether I would come back to
see them if they continued to study well. It was clear to me that they only
felt like they had a voice that was limited to certain spaces. So, I was very
hopeful that our program would have a great impact on that community. I was
100% sure that we were in the right place doing the right thing.

I followed that trip with a visit to some schools in India
and particularly to travel with a group of girls who had been in our program
for six years and were invited to participate in the International Cricket
World Cup.

We were invited as part of our partnership with the ICC to
have our girls experience cricket practices, and meet some of the players, and
be interviewed by the BBC. So, I approached that opportunity thinking I would
need to prepare the girls to be in front of the camera, that these girls had
never been on a plane before and we were taking them to an urban center from a
place that was quite far away. They were traveling for a few hours by plane for
the first time.

Before I could sit them down and start going through a
proper training session they started seeing the players on the field. A few of
their role models were coming off the field and they ran right up to them and
started asking them about whether they were going to be focused on the next
game. They were completely self-confident and assured of themselves, and knew
that they had an important voice. One that could be heard even amongst six-foot
tall cricket players they had only seen on television.

To me it was just an incredible juxtaposition of what our
program is intended to do, to provide girls with a voice with choices, with a
sense of self-worth. I think a lot of times in the international development
community we talk about girls education as though its only value is to GDP.
But, I always remind people there is really no price for self-confidence,
self-worth and a sense of purpose. These girls definitely show that to us every
day.

This is a mission that that is quite real to me because just
one generation ago child marriage was not very uncommon in my own family. So,
when I look back at our family and the role that education played in my
mother’s fight for her own future, I can honestly say that I would not be here
as a CEO of Room To Read if it weren’t for her, her story. My family history
has proven to me that knowledge gives you the power of choice and dignity. So,
providing literacy, providing libraries to children – it gives them the chance
to learn about opportunity, but also to seek it.

I can’t say enough how important the transformational power
of education is because both on a personal and a professional level, I’ve seen
the power of education in my own family. My mother’s choice ensured that her
entire generation had a changed trajectory and ensured that I am where I am
today. I believe that education can ensure others have the same rights and that
too, for the long term. So, it is the one proven equalizer and the only proven
tool for long-term change in communities.

Well, I would just end by saying that it’s incredibly
important for all of us to recognize that we can be part of some pretty complex
solutions. I’m known to quote Walt Disney quite a bit, and the idea that it’s
kind of fun to do the impossible. The reason I say that is that a lot of time
we throw out these big statistics and think about these big numbers, and it’s
easy to think, well I can’t do anything about that. But, being a part of
organizations like Room to Read and movements that help support our mission
does ensure that millions of children can have a different life.

We may not be able to do all of that alone, but together we
can definitely accomplish incredible things. So, I would just end by saying for
all of you who believe that world change starts with educated children, join us
and help us make the changes we want to see in the world.

We’d love for you to learn more about us at our website,
www.roomtoread.org, and you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
as well. We have instructions on how to start your own campaigns in support of
literacy and girls’ education or to join a chapter. So, get involved in
whatever way makes sense for you, and we’d love to have you on board.

Why We Burned Our First Leadership Book, or How to Develop a Leadership Path that Holds Personal Meaning

Presenter: Adriane Herrick Jaurez

Co-Presenter : Becca Lael – Park City Library

Utah Library Association Conference

Thursday, May 16, 1:30-2:20pm

Mountain America Expo Center

How can we develop a leadership path that holds personal meaning? Inspired by interviews from the Library Leadership Podcast, a variety of strategic insights will show us how everyone can improve their leadership to personally shape their workplace, the community they serve, and the trajectory of the library profession. Attendees will learn how one library manager’s leadership path was transformed to include personal meaning, resulting in braver development.

Commencement Speaker for the Graduation of the Utah State Regional Master of Library Science ProgramFriday, January 5, 7:00pm Viridian Event Center I will be giving a commencement speech for the graduating class of Cohort 12.

Utah State History Conference
October 10th– 11th, 2017 Rio Grande Depot, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, UT Honoring the Past, Moving Into the Future: The Renovation of the Historic Park City Library that Developed a Dynamic 21st Century Library while Achieving National Historic Register Designation.

Nevada/Mountain Plains Library Association Joint ConferenceOctober 16th – 18th, 2017 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 50 US-50, Stateline, NV89449
Lightning-round presentation on how The Park City Library recently underwent a $9.6M library renovation that included the creation of a media lab that included a sound booth, green screen, film equipment, and other high tech amenities to foster independent media production in a ‘film-centric’ mountain town that is accessible to everyone, not just movie producers.